Immerse Yourself

In the control room of a U.S. Navy submarine, six sailors attempt the delicate task of steering through a narrow waterway choked with marine traffic and submerged mines. A navigator consults digital charts of the busy strait and directs the helmsman at the wheel, while technicians check the radar for surface vessels.

The scene looks and sounds like a day spent maintaining the nation’s maritime defenses, but these naval personnel are actually ROTC students at NC State University. They’re training in the Hunt Library’s Creativity Studio, a high-tech “white box” space that runs the most advanced version of the Navy’s Mariner Skills Simulator.

"The cutting-edge technologies being employed at the Hunt Library are a radical departure from our typical classroom," said Eric Pfefferkorn, training systems program manager at the Naval Air Warfare Center. "Being located at the Hunt gives the Navy the opportunity to teach in a truly virtual environment.”

The Hunt Library’s immersive technologies put midshipmen at the helm of naval vessels.

The Hunt Library stands at the epicenter of NC State’s emerging digital campus, where immersive technologies are transforming experiential education and pushing our solution-driven research to the forefront of interdisciplinary innovation.

In the Hunt Library’s Teaching and Visualization Lab, researchers from our Institute for Transportation Research and Education partner with civil engineering faculty to use state-of-the-art methods to plan new highways. On the lab’s 270-degree video walls, planners and citizens can watch a new overpass rise and experience its effects on everything from traffic patterns to sunlight in nearby neighborhoods.

Traffic researchers have an immersive new tool for highway planning in the Hunt Library’s Teaching and Visualization Lab.

“The technology finally caught up with my ambition,” says John Wall, the English professor who collaborated with historians, archaeologists, architects, IT experts and the National Endowment for the Humanities to create the Donne exhibit.

With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, NC State faculty recreated the sights and sounds of a 17th-century John Donne sermon.